I noticed that it was the subject of business – how many millions they had invested, and so on – which disturbed Robin most. Not only did she shutter her eyes and pinch her nostrils from the inside when Neil explained that they were on a ten-year plan, and what’s more ahead of schedule, she actually succeeded in sucking in the whole of her frame, contracting every part of herself from her shoulder blades to her abdomen, as if in an act of instantaneous anorexia.

‘There I go again,’ Neil said. He actually took pleasure in it, like a kamikaze pilot.

It was clear that there’d been a time, in the incubation period of Neil’s ten-year plan, when they’d had a lot of fun setting up their various businesses, and travelling off every weekend into the bush, a pair of romantic outback Aussies with their heads screwed on. But now they were having fewer and fewer of those bush jaunts. Neil was wired into his machinery seven days a week. Robin was chained to her pharmacy. They worked long hours. They took few holidays. And they weren’t wild about their customers. Well, we knew at least what that was like. And for all their present relational disharmony we squeezed one good hour out of the evening, swapping stories about the horrors of seasonal trade, and generally deriving that kind of ghoulish pleasure remembering the vileness of the buying public which is the sole consolation of the small retailer the world over.

It certainly gave us more pleasure than the food or the service. Although the restaurant had a sign at the entrance advising that booking was absolutely essential, only two customers besides ourselves showed up for a meal. But having six people to serve in a restaurant that could seat sixty put pressure on the waitress none the less. She was unable to describe for us a single item on the menu, and was even more surprised than we were when ‘Sunrise Potatoes’ turned out to be a dollop of ready-mash squeezed through an icing-bag to resemble a meringue or a cow-pat sitting on a slice of orange. Where she was strong, however, was in the etiquette department. Plates crashed to the floor, glasses splintered in our hands, our pepper steaks swam in a thick sweet gravy, but the waitress refused to compromise on the minutiae of ceremony. ‘You must always stand by the lady when you serve,’ she said. ‘It isn’t the thing to do it any other way.’

After the meal, Neil ordered Bundaberg rum and coke all round and eased the conversation effortlessly back to coons. ‘We had trouble a year or so back,’ he said. ‘They tried a spot of violence on the streets. It’s reasonably calm now, but I’ll tell you this: had they raped a white woman I’d have joined a vigilante group.’